It's not that you deny the horrors of life, it's that you want a world without them, and the act of faith that is charm gives it instantaneous birth—an innocent rather than a naive world. And innocence was born to be insulted. Your charm, if you only knew it, is your seriousness, but you experience seriousness as danger. When it takes hold it replicates, draws other seriousnesses to it until it collapses under its own weight and makes a fool of you. It is your defense against being a fool that you identify yourself as frivolous. Nothing can take you in. You work yourself into an ecstasy of confession but your positions are larks. You affect, for example, a character (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR). Character is always a comic device—people don't have characters—and your arch parody of your own holds at bay a screaming claustrophobia. Do you want more? You might not be able to perform your service if you had more, not that it's available. Even this threatens to become a style. (See also MANNERS.)